This invention relates generally to temperature sensing devices and, more particularly, to a temperature sensing device that may be left in an article of meat while cooking and which a visually indicates a meat temperature without accuracy being influenced by ambient air temperatures.
Meat thermometers are frequently used both in restaurants and at home for determining if a piece of meat has been cooked adequately, completely, or to a specific temperature. For accurate operation, all thermometers require that the portion of the device that is doing the actual temperature sensing be inside and completely surrounded by the meat being evaluated. If any part of the sensing device, i.e. the thermometer shaft is outside the meat, an inaccurate reading is likely in that the measurement may be influenced by the temperature of the ambient air surrounding the shaft rather than the meat itself.
Various devices have been proposed in the art for sensing the temperature of a meat product and for visually indicating the temperature to a user. Although assumably effective for their intended purposes, a consistent limitation of these proposals is that the temperature sensor must be inserted and read repeatedly. As with traditional meat thermometers, repeated insertion and removal of the thermometer introduces the possibility of introducing bacteria to the food product.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a meat temperature sensing device that may be left in the food product through an entire cooking process so as to eliminate the potential for introducing bacteria as a result of multiple thermometer insertions. Further, it would be desirable to have a meat temperature sensing device that allows the sensing element to be fully inserted into a meat product while still visually indicating a temperature clearly to a user. In addition, it would be desirable to have a meat temperature sensing device that measures only the actual temperature of the meat and is not influenced by the temperature of surrounding ambient air.